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Reviews

From the stack: The Zabîme Sisters

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I’m working my way through the top ten books on the 2011 Great Graphic Novels for Teens, one of which is the late Aristophane’s The Zabîme Sisters (First Second). It follows three girls from Guadeloupe through their first day of summer vacation, and it does so with a degree of clarity, honesty, and restraint that’s quite surprising and very refreshing.

Bossy M’Rose wants to watch a fight between the school bully and one of his targets. Attention-hungry Célina wants to hang out with some girlfriends. Timid Ella just seems to want as pleasant and peaceful a day as she can manage. They cross paths with classmates who have their own agendas and concerns. Manuel is trying to figure out what to do about his father’s broken pipe. Euzhan has smuggled some rum out of the house to share with her girlfriends. Some things go well, some go badly, and some just go.

Aristophane’s approach to slice of life is meticulously subdued. His narrative never overpromises, maintaining a steady pace of event but never inflating those moments into more than just moments. It’s a day, not an epic, and there’s comfort and familiarity in the string of anticlimaxes. The pleasure of The Zabîme Sisters is in its simplicity and candor.

Part of that candor comes in the form of sharp little bits of exposition that Aristophane sprinkled throughout the narrative. When Célina joins her family for breakfast, Aristophane offered this narration:

“Célina got up after making them beg her. She took particular pleasure in being pleaded with and in feeling indispensible. When she got this attention first thing in the morning, she felt especially content.”

These bits of omniscience are frank and illuminating, but they’re never intrusive. They add wonderful layers to the events, and they rarely flatter their subjects. Aristophane isn’t mocking his characters, per se, but his assessments are unsparing. But they reveal the emotional complexity of the characters, too, and they add weight and clarity to their actions. It’s a terrifically successful technique, and it lifts the book to a higher level.

The art has the same kind of chunky, inky beauty that I find so appealing in the work of Iou (Sexy Voice and Robo) Kuroda. Just about every panel is absorbing in its own way, with shifting perspectives and an eye-catching haziness. There’s a blend of precision and abstraction that adds interest; you’re always sure of what you’re seeing, but the rendering has enough oddity and expressionism to keep refreshing the way you see it. (Publishers Weekly ran several preview pages from the book.)

I’m actually kind of embarrassed that this book largely escaped my attention before making it onto the top ten list. It’s the kind of thoughtfully inventive work that always excites me, and its unique elements and techniques cohere in really admirable ways.

Other reviews in this intermittent series:

  • Set to Sea, written and illustrated by Drew Weing, Fantagraphics

You can nominate titles for the next Great Graphic Novel for Teen List, and you can take a look at the current batch of contenders.

 

Wandering Son 1 by Shimura Takako: A

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Book description:
The fifth grade. The threshold to puberty, and the beginning of the end of childhood innocence. Shuichi Nitori and his new friend Yoshino Takatsuki have happy homes, loving families, and are well-liked by their classmates. But they share a secret that further complicates a time of life that is awkward for anyone: Shuichi is a boy who wants to be a girl, and Yoshino is a girl who wants to be a boy. Written and drawn by one of today’s most critically acclaimed creators of manga, Shimura portrays Shuishi and Yoshino’s very private journey with affection, sensitivity, gentle humor, and unmistakable flair and grace. Volume one introduces our two protagonists and the friends and family whose lives intersect with their own. Yoshino is rudely reminded of her sex by immature boys whose budding interest in girls takes clumsily cruel forms. Shuichi’s secret is discovered by Saori, a perceptive and eccentric classmate. And it is Saori who suggests that the fifth graders put on a production of The Rose of Versailles for the farewell ceremony for the sixth graders—with boys playing the roles of women, and girls playing the roles of men.

Wandering Son is a sophisticated work of literary manga translated with rare skill and sensitivity by veteran translator and comics scholar Matt Thorn.

Review:
The main thing I kept thinking about while reading Wandering Son—beyond the continuous undercurrent of general squee—is how things that seem insignificant to one person can be secretly, intensely significant to someone else.

Wandering Son begins simply. Nitori Shuichi (the translation retains Japanese name order) is an extremely shy fifth-grade boy, and as the volume opens, he and his sixth-grade sister, Maho, are preparing for their first day at a new school. Upon arrival, Shuichi is instructed to sit next to Takatsuki Yoshino, a girl so tall and handsome that she’s called Takatsuki-kun by her classmates. They become friends.

One day, when Shuichi goes to Takatsuki’s house to work on some homework, he spies a frilly dress hanging in her room. Perhaps Takatsuki didn’t mean much of anything when she suggested that Shuichi should wear it, but it’s an idea that refuses to leave his head, despite his protests that he isn’t interested. He ends up taking the dress home and giving it to Maho, but its presence in their shared bedroom taunts him.

At this point, Shuichi isn’t thinking about things like gender identity. He’s ten! Instead, he’s dealing with processing the new idea that he could wear a dress and that he might even want to. Slowly, and bolstered by interactions with another encouraging classmate, he begins experimenting. First, he buys a headband. Then he tries dressing as a girl while no one else is home. Finally, when Takatsuki reveals her own treasured possession—her elder brother’s cast-off junior high uniform—he tries going out as a girl in public, with Takatsuki (as a boy) at his side.

One wonders what would’ve happened to Shuichi without Takatsuki to set the example. Would he have become aware of these feelings within himself eventually or been somehow unfulfilled forever? Her comments and her acceptance mean more to him than she knows, as he has a habit of internalizing things that are said to him. After an adorable turn in a female role in a drag version of The Rose of Versailles at school, for example, Maho conversationally notes, “You should have been born a girl.” Again, this is a concept that’s new to Shuichi, but one he gradually comes to believe is true. When his grandmother promises to buy him a present, he visualizes his female form and realizes it’s what he most wants. “Even grandma can’t buy me this.”

I had no problem seeing Takatsuki as a boy throughout, because of her inner certainty and obviously boyish appearance, but Shuichi was more problematic. The moment he confronts the mental vision of what he feels he should be, however, and realizes that he truly wants to be a girl, he starts to become one for the reader. By contrast, it’s shocking when the onset of her first period reminds readers that Takatsuki is biologically female. Though she mostly projects a confident air, her anguish at the undeniable truth that she is not really a boy is intense.

The story is subtle, simple, poignant, and innocent. The tone is matched by Shimura’s uncluttered artwork, which features big panels, little screentone, and extremely minimal backgrounds. These factors combine to make the volume go by quickly, and all too soon it’s over. While waiting for volume two, in which Shuichi and Takatsuki will progress to the sixth grade, I suspect I will have to console myself with the anime adaptation, currently available on Crunchyroll.

The first volume of Wandering Son—published in English by Fantagraphics—will be available in June 2011. The series is still ongoing in Japan, where it is currently up to eleven volumes.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

From the stack: House of Five Leaves vol. 2

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Of all of the series in Viz’s SigIKKI initiative, I think Natsume Ono’s House of Five Leaves is probably my favorite. It’s intriguing in a very delicate, oblique way, and it’s rare to be able to say that about… well… just about any kind of entertainment.

It’s about an out-of-work samurai called Masa who falls in with a gang of kidnappers. Masa isn’t a bad person, but he lacks confidence, and he doesn’t inspire it. He looks physically frail, and whatever good intentions he may have are outweighed by the harsh realities of his jobless existence.

Beyond necessity, the gang, the Five Leaves, have a kind of lazy allure. They aren’t violent, and they plan carefully to make sure they profit from their illegal activities. There’s Matsukichi, the spy who prefers to keep his own counsel. In the rest of his life, Ume owns a bar and looks after his daughter who’s just entering adulthood. Sexy, mature Otake views life with a wry curiosity. And Yaichi, their ringleader, has a shady glamour and a strange kind of affection for, or at least profound interest in, Masa.

They’re appealing individually and as a quintet. Ono has assembled the kind of cast I could happily read about if they just sat around and drank and gossiped (which they do a lot). But she finds surprising depths in all of them, and she shifts their relationships around in measured but heartfelt ways.

The second volume digs into Umezo’s criminal past as it encroaches on his present. Masa is recuperating with Ume’s former boss, Goinkyo. Two of Goinkyo’s former underlings are stirring up trouble, one reluctantly and one maliciously. There’s blackmail involved, and violence, but they’re secondary to the dynamics that fuel them. Fatherly Goinkyo seems to have a sense for people who aren’t cut out for a life of crime, and his observations resonate through the events and revelations of the volume. And, of course, there’s Yaichi, guarding his secrets and managing the state of his colleagues at the same time, while wanting to not seem like he’s trying very hard.

In that, he’s representative of the series itself. It kind of glides along, casting sideways glances at its characters that mask the sharpness of its observations. It’s sly, but it’s also very sincere. With an apparent absence of effort, Ono has crafted a cast and a set of circumstances that are deeply involving, even at a very low volume. Ono leaves you wanting to know everything there is to know about these intensely private people, even as you understand she probably won’t spill everything. As low-key as House of Five Leaves is, it’s also cumulatively stunning. I can’t get enough of its hidden depths.

 

The Manga Hall of Shame: Wounded Man

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Nicholas Cage, I have a swell idea for your next project: option the rights to Wounded Man. This mid-eighties schlockfest is tailor made for you. It has a hero with extravagantly bad hair, bad guys so charismatic they beg for Christopher Walken or Sharon Stone to play them, and copious amounts of acrobatic sex and violence. And while it lacks the evil Nazis and mad scientists of Offered, another Kazuo Koike gem set in South America, Wounded Man does Offered one better: the series’ main villain is a pornographer. But not the sleazy, sad-sack type who might be the prime suspect on a Law & Order: SVU episode — no, the chief villain in Wounded Man runs a studio called God’s Pornographic X-Rated Films, a.k.a. GPX. She also wears a caftan and carries a parasol.

You know she’s evil.

Wounded Man begins in Brazil, where Yuko Kusaka, an ambitious young NHK reporter, is pursuing a story about a modern-day gold rush in the Amazon basin. Yuko is intent on finding “Rio Baraki,” a prospector who’s rumored to be Japanese. Baraki finds her first, however, savagely attacking her in a city park. “You’d better thank me because this could be much worse!” he tells Yuko. “Go back to Japan if you don’t want anymore trouble!” (He also talks to her at great length about the unsavory eating habits of Amazonian fish, dialogue that’s so unsafe for work I’ll do the honorable thing and not reprint it here.)

What Baraki doesn’t count on is that Yuko falls madly in love with him, following him deep into the jungle in spite of his dire warnings. She and her camera crew are ambushed by bandits, tied up, and sexually tortured; Baraki rescues them. She then jettisons her crew and tags along with Baraki. Once again, she’s ambushed, tied up, and sexually tortured; once again, Baraki rescues her. Baraki and Yuko then fight; they have sex; and Baraki tells Yuko his sad story, a story even more screwed up than all crazy, non-con antics that preceded it.

Baraki, it turns out, was once Keisuke Ibaraki, star quarterback at USC. After a big game, a group of thugs kidnapped him and his high school sweetheart, threatening them with death if Baraki refused to make an X-rated film with a famous female tennis player. Baraki turned GPX down; his heart belonged to Natsuko, and no amount of money would compromise his resolve. Not even the prospect of starvation undermined his commitment to Natsuko — naked and locked in a dungeon, the two survived by drinking each other’s urine before Natsuko finally died. Baraki lived, and has been plotting his revenge ever since he escaped GPX’s clutches.

I’m not making this up.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that a couple of porn-addled teenagers were responsible for the script, however; the whole story feels like something concocted by Dirk Diggler in one of his pitiful bids for movie-actor legitimacy. Though the ostensible genre is action/adventure, the story’s epic sex scenes take up more than half the first volume alone, with only the occasional fist-fight or manly swim through piranha-infested waters to relieve the tedium. The most reprehensible aspect of all the fornicating, however, is how little of it is genuinely consensual. Yuko is molested by Baraki, by random smugglers and poachers, even by members of her own television crew in a scene unpleasantly reminiscent of Deliverance, yet Koike and artist Ryochi Ikegami play these episodes for maximum titillation, trotting out one of the hoariest, most offensive cliches from the rape culture playbook: the victim who falls for her attacker because the sex is so amazing.

I wish I were making this up.

Koike and Ryoichi Ikegami find other ways to offend as well. The Brazilian characters are drawn as crude caricatures, with hulking physiques, gap-toothed smiles, and leering eyes; their primary role in the story is menacing Yuko. The few female characters are equally ridiculous, shunning clothing the way six-year-olds shun brussell sprouts; I’ve never seen so much laughably gratuitous nudity in a manga before. (The naked tennis player is kind of disconcerting, however, as she looks an awful lot like Martina Navratilova.)

The series’ greatest offense, however, is the way Yuko is portrayed. She may be a judo champ, capable of delivering a high-flying kick, and a rising star at the NHK, scoring high ratings with her investigative journalism, but her behavior is so petulant, so dumb, and so completely contradictory that Koike undermines her identity as a competent, strong woman. “That’s right, I hate you,” she tells Baraki during one of their numerous fights. “But at the same time, I love you so much! I’m so in love with you and I get so weak just being touched by you.” Her frequent hysterical outbursts would be comical if they didn’t serve to infantilize and diminish her, robbing her of any meaningful agency or identity outside of sex object.

Really, I wish I were making this up.

I’d be the first to admit that Wounded Man is luridly fascinating. It’s hard to imagine who thought any of it was a good idea, though it unfolds in such a fast, furious, and utterly unironic fashion that readers may be swept up in the story despite their better judgment. In short, Wounded Man is perfect fodder for a Nick Cage movie. Agents, are you listening?

WOUNDED MAN, VOLS. 1-9 • STORY BY KAZUO KOIKE, ART BY RYOICHI IKEGAMI • COMICSONE • RATING: MATURE (COPIOUS NUDITY AND VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN, STRONG LANGUAGE, INANE PLOT TWISTS)

From the stack: Dorohedoro vols. 1-3

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It’s probably silly, but I always feel guilty that I don’t like Q Hayashida’s Dorohedoro (Viz) more than I do. I find it difficult to pinpoint exactly what the barrier is for me, since there are so many things to admire about the comic.

Most notable is Hayashida’s sensibility, which she has in abundance. While stories about magic are usually filled with sparkle, she’s set-dressed hers in convincing grime and clutter. Her main setting is a world called The Hole, and the name isn’t ironic. It’s a filthy, often frightening place where average humans live and try and protect themselves from magic-using sorcerers who like to experiment on the non-gifted. But it’s also a strangely homey place. Sure, violence is routine, and you’re living at the whim of powerful beings with next to no conscience, but you can find good dumplings.

Hayashida applies the same gritty-but-not approach to her characters. Our hero, Caiman, is an amnesiac with the head of a lizard. He’s terrifying to look at, but he’s goofy and kind of sweet when he isn’t chomping his jaws down on the heads of sorcerers to see if they’re the one who left him with no memory and a reptilian noggin. He’s very solicitous of Nikaido, the tough girl who makes the dumplings and helps him with his various projects (like the head chomping). They have an appealing rapport, and they’re very protective of each other.

Even the villains have their virtues, mostly because they aren’t entirely focused on villainy. Sorcerer mobster En seems to have a dozen different agendas at once, any of which can be set aside for an adorable (but creepy) new pet. His enforcers, Shin and Noi, are kind of the cloudy, mirror version of Caiman and Nikaido, but with an added level of blithe certainty. They’re endearingly amoral, not even bothering to justify they’re actions. They like their lives, whether they’re eating lunch or slicing and dicing hapless humans.

So, with an interesting cast and a distinct vibe, what’s the problem? I think it’s in the storytelling, which can feel not fully realized. I find it difficult to invest in Caiman’s quest to find out what happened to him. Aside from a general (and justified) sense of being badly used, there isn’t much in the way of specific urgency to Caiman’s search for answers and vengeance. He’s certainly likeable, but his aims seem strangely small. They could represent the overall injustices visited on the denizens of The Hole at the hands of the sorcerers, but Hayashida doesn’t really go there. Keeping things relatively light is an interesting choice that works in a lot of ways, but I keep wishing she’d raise the overall stakes a bit.

On another storytelling front, the staging of certain sequences can be rather confusing, especially when a lot is happening at once. I love the look of the book overall – the environments, the character design, some of the witty ways Hayashida plays around with pacing – but I wish there was a more consistent level of clarity.

Since you can do so for free, at least with chapters that haven’t seen print yet, I’d certainly encourage people to read Dorohedoro. And I certainly wouldn’t recommend a whole lot of things that you can read for free, because time has value. But this series has a lot of strengths, and Hayashida seems to be a remarkable creator in a number of significant ways. Dorohedoro just isn’t as tight as I would hope, and it feels like it could be without losing any of its quirky appeal.

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Qwan

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I have a bad habit of falling in love with commercially doomed series. Satsuma Gishiden was my first great disappointment: Dark Horse published three volumes of this manly-man samurai manga, only to put the series on ice in 2007. Duck Prince was another, with Ai Morinaga’s awesomely weird comedy getting the axe midway through its run, a victim of CPM’s perpetual cash flow problems. But the cancellation that really broke my heart was Qwan, a fantasy-adventure that drew heavily on Chinese history and folklore for its inspiration. Between 2005 and 2007, Tokyopop released four volumes before putting the series on hiatus, leaving Qwan‘s few die-hard fans stranded in the middle of a crucial story arc.

While I’d be the first to admit that reading an unfinished story can be an exercise in frustration, I’m going to recommend Qwan anyway because the four volumes that were published are awesome — Scout’s honor.

The story focuses on Qwan, a child-like figure whose naivete and enthusiasm belie super-human strength and speed. Though Qwan realizes he isn’t human, he’s never questioned his origins or abilities — that is, until he meets Shaga, a courtesan who urges him to seek the Essential Arts of Peace, a sutra that will reveal where Qwan came from and why he was sent to live among humans. He’s not the only one who wants the sutra, however; various political factions vie for the scrolls, hoping to unlock the scrolls’ power and hasten the Han Dynasty’s demise.

Questing boys and magical scrolls are de rigeur in fantasy-adventure stories, but Qwan distinguishes itself in two crucial areas. The first is well-rounded characters. Qwan isn’t a classic Shonen Jump hero, kind-hearted and dedicated to self-improvement, but a more ambiguous figure; he’s guileless and self-centered in the manner of a nine- or ten-year-old, unable to feel genuine sympathy for others. Early in volume one, for example, Qwan encounters a mysterious girl traveling in the company of a demon. Daki proves more a formidable opponent than Qwan anticipates, successfully countering his attack with powerful insect magic. Though it’s clear to the reader that Daki, like Qwan, is a supernatural being, caught between the human and demon worlds, Qwan himself never sees the parallels between their situations, repeatedly attacking Daki until he resigns himself to the futility of his efforts.

The second distinguishing feature of Qwan is Aki Shimizu’s gorgeous artwork, which draws on anime, guo hua (classical Chinese painting), and wuxia films for its aesthetic. Though Shimizu usually blends these different styles into a seamless whole, she occasionally makes explicit, almost self-conscious quotations of her influences. In this panel, which appears in the very first chapter, she gracefully echoes the undulating lines and shapes of Chinese landscape paintings, even adding a delicately stylized pine tree in the foreground:

Her fight scenes, too, are steeped in Chinese influences. Using dramatic angles, she makes her characters look as weightless as the wire-fu acrobats in Curse of the Golden Flower and House of Flying Daggers; her fight scenes are balletic, beautifully choreographed sequences of tumbling bodies and arcing swords. In this sequence, for example, Qwan goes mano-a-mano with a tiger demon, eventually gaining the upper hand by vaulting onto the monster’s back:

Qwan then consumes the demon at the end of their protracted battle, the demon’s body dissolving into an inky swirl:

Oh, and Shimizu draws some pretty nifty monsters, too. This one suggests a Maltese-water buffalo hybrid with prehensile toes:

So why wasn’t Qwan a bigger hit? I think narrative complexity was a factor. Though the story is a rich tapestry of political history and myth, Shimizu refuses to spoon feed information to the reader; we’re just as confused and disoriented as Qwan himself is. That kind of reading experience can be quite rewarding, but the absence of an omniscient narrator demands more of the audience, forcing us to pore over the text and make connections on our own. Shimizu’s artwork and characterizations are up to the task, but impatient readers will easily miss crucial details in their haste to get to the fight scenes.

I also think timing was a factor in Qwan’s cancellation, as Qwan‘s fourth volume appeared in 2007 at the height of the manga boom. If you remember that heady period, publishers were releasing more than 1,200 new volumes of manga per year. Titles that didn’t have an obvious hook — say, a popular anime adaptation or a cast of hot male vampires — faced an uphill battle, with bookstores unwilling to stock series whose first or second volumes sold poorly. With little support from the publisher, and few fans blogging about it, Qwan was all but consigned to the remainder bin.

I’m under no illusion that my paean to Qwan will save it from licensing purgatory; for every Yotsuba&!, there are two Tactics, manga that didn’t gain much traction even after a well-publicized rescue. But Qwan is so good that I can’t help but wish that someone will complete the series. It’s a manga for people who love great stories and vivid characters, who care more about the quality of the storytelling than the coolness of the concepts and costumes.

QWAN, VOLS. 1-4 • BY AKI SHIMIZU • TOKYOPOP • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

From the stack: Kimi ni Todoke vol. 5

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My recent brush with Bakuman (Viz) helped me realize something (probably after everyone else already got there) about Karuho Shiina’s Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You (also Viz). Shiina is deconstructing shôjo manga as surely as Ohba and Obata are dissecting shônen. Of course, Shiina is telling a proper story with engaging characters at the same time, so she wins.

This became blazingly evident in the fifth volume. It begins with our heroine, socially inept Sawako, deep in conversation with Kurumi, who likes the same boy Sawako does and is trying to manipulate Sawako into stepping aside. In spite of her almost complete innocence in matters interpersonal, Sawako is incredibly hard to manipulate, and she’s just so damned nice. Kurumi is infuriated, at least partly because some part of her recognizes that Sawako is possibly more worthy of kindly Kazehaya’s affection than Kurumi is.

This isn’t an uncommon emotional beat for shôjo manga, but it rarely gets the degree of articulation it receives here. Kurumi must not only admit her resentment of Sawako, she must also explain to this foreign exchange student from Mars exactly why she resents her. And while the experience provides some kind of catharsis for the duplicitous Kurumi, it doesn’t entirely soften her feelings for Sawako. It does clarify them, for both Kurumi and Sawako, and they culminate in a glorious moment when Kurumi, pretense abandoned, beams at Sawako and declares them rivals.

It’s not just Kurumi being argumentative. It’s Kurumi being generous, helping Sawako understand. And it’s Kurumi liberating herself from a stifling public persona. Most of all, it’s Shiina celebrating the construct, the pairing of people who want the same limited resource (a title, a prize, a love interest) who both understand the other’s desire and respect their right to want it but realize that their ultimate happiness is mutually exclusive.

This is what I mean by deconstruction. Most mangaka would just go through the beats of this realization without underlining it so baldly, but the baldness is what makes Shiina’s approach soar. It’s like you’re Sawako, discovering all of these new things, except you already knew them, and yet the rediscovery is as thrilling as the first time you grasped them.

There’s lots of other stuff that happens in this volume, and all of it is charming and good, because Shiina wrote and drew it. But the definition of rivalry, old as shôjo and fresh as now, is the kind of emotional peak that represents the best of this excellent series. Bakuman is most intriguing as an instruction manual, and it’s savvy (but joyless) about what works in a certain type of manga. Kimi ni Todoke both defines and celebrates its own category’s building blocks.

 

From the stack: Gunslinger Girl vols. 1-3

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Long ago, in his pre-Vertical days, Ed Chavez helped me out with a roundtable on underrated comics. One of his choices was Yu Aida’s Gunslinger Girl, originally published in English by ADV and recently re-launched in three-book anthologies by Seven Seas. I’m just going to have to repeat Ed’s assessment in full (though I’ll add some links where appropriate):

In a similar way to how the word otaku has a negative connotation in Japan, but is almost embraced in America. Moe has been frowned upon by American otaku while it is clearly the foundation of everything otaku in Japan. Gunslinger Girl fulfills three different unique passions/fetishes:

1- A passion for anything Italian. After the Korean wave came a huge Italy boom, partially supported by Bambino (an Italian cooking manga), the handful of wine manga that are all over the international press, and Sarto Finito – the original Italian suit manga.

2- A Sonoda Kenichi-style obsession with guns. Where building and firing guns take on an almost sexual feel.

3- And the need to raise soulless emotionally damaged bishôjo that so many otaku have.

Gunslinger Girl… Well drawn primer to pop-culture perversion.

The beauty of this is that it could serve as an endorsement or the direst of warnings, depending on your taste. And even after all this time, it’s left me curious about the book, at least enough to invest about $16 for three volumes worth of content. I’m largely immune to the fetishes described above, but I enjoyed Gunslinger Girl.

It’s about a black-ops agency that brings cute girls back from the brink of death and turns them into cute assassins, each assigned to adult male handlers who display varying levels of intimacy with their charges. And no, it’s not that kind of intimacy, though it’s not like that kind of awkward possibility is never broached. It’s just part of a larger jumble of awkwardness that comes with murderous little girls being ruthlessly manipulated and used to fight terrorism and stuff.

To Aida’s credit, the Italian/weaponry/pert troika is contextualized. Even the people who participate in the process of creating these little girl killers recognize that it’s horrible on some level, especially the bits where they brainwash the girls to be loyal to their handlers and erase their memories when things get complicated. That’s undeniably awful, and only the most tone-deaf of mangaka would ignore that. Gunslinger Girl is hardly a moral treatise, but it isn’t shameless, either.

It’s very episodic, focusing on individual cyborg-handler relationships through the prism of missions, down time, medical crises, and the like. Aida gets good mileage out of the premise, at least in these three volumes. I can’t quite picture myself reading ten more, though.

As much violence as there is, and as observant as Aida can be, Gunslinger Girl doesn’t really benefit from being read in bulk. I think I would have liked it better in serialization, where its low-key moodiness would have stood out in contrast to other series. Two volumes of low-key moodiness gets to be a bit lulling, so I was relieved to see the third shift into a longer narrative. It launches a complicated, sometimes messy tale of greed, kidnapping, sabotage, and assassination, and it doesn’t always track very well with Aida’s initial themes. He does try and weave them in from time to time with relative success, but I missed the murderous little girls.

Gunslinger Girl ends up being rather contradictory for me. It was obviously at least partly conceived to pander to certain tastes that I don’t share, but it’s also not content with just successfully pandering. It can be introspective and oblique, and it’s got an impressive level of ambition, even though its ambition isn’t always realized. It’s an odd book. I’m glad I read it, but I don’t know if I really need to read any more.

 

Kamisama Kiss, Vols. 1-2

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Has Japan experienced a recent surge in pachinko-related child abandonment? I ask because Kamisama Kiss is, by my count, the fourth manga I’ve read in which a parent (a) racks up gambling debt (b) angers his creditors and (c) skips town, leaving his son or daughter to deal with the consequences. Nanami, Kamisama‘s plucky heroine, comes home from school to discover an eviction notice on the kitchen table alongside a hastily scrawled letter: “I’m going on a trip. Sorry. Don’t look for me. Dad.”

With no place to go — apparently, she has no relatives or friends with a couch — Nanami begins camping out in a local park, where she rescues a nervous man from an aggressive dog. As an expression of gratitude for “saving” him, Mikage offers Nanami a place to stay. What Nanami doesn’t know is that Mikage is the deity of a small, decrepit shrine, and is responsible for maintaining it, hearing visitors’ prayers, and warding off evil spirits — responsibilities he passes on to Nanami by planting a kiss on her forehead.

Once ensconced in the shrine, Nanami meets Mikage’s familiar, a haughty fox demon named Tomoe. You don’t need a PhD in Manga to guess what sort of chap Tomoe is: he’s good-looking, perpetually cranky, and quick to insult his new boss. The two bicker constantly about issues great and small, from Tomoe’s snotty tone of voice to Nanami’s inability to defend herself against demons. Over time, however, the two form a reluctant partnership, pledging to protect the shrine together.

If the story feels a little shopworn, the characterizations are vivid and engaging. Julietta Suzuki does a credible job of showing us how Nanami and Tomoe discover that they’re more alike than different; as their antagonistic banter reveals, both are stubborn, loyal, and concerned with other people’s welfare. Making those tart exchanges more entertaining is the fact that Nanami and Tomoe are equally matched; Nanami isn’t as verbally adroit as Tomoe, but she’s perfectly capable of tricking or browbeating him into following her orders.

Where Kamisama Kiss runs aground is in the predictability of its plotting. Every crisis — a threat to the shrine, the introduction of a romantic rival — builds to a crucial moment in which one character realizes that he or she can’t do without the other. Of course, neither is willing to label those feelings as love, forcing the story into an indefinite holding pattern in which the leads teeter on the brink of romance for dozens of chapters. Even the introduction of demonic rivals doesn’t do much to distract from the obvious plot turns, though it does provide Suzuki a swell excuse to draw fancy kimonos, angel wings, and androgynous boys. (I particularly liked the tengu who hid in plain sight by pretending to be a teen idol. Now I’d read a manga about him.)

I liked Kamisama Kiss, but found it totally forgettable — the umpteenth story in which characters from two very different worlds fall in love in spite of their differences. To be sure, there’s a certain pleasure in seeing an author put her romantic leads through their paces, but Suzuki adheres so strictly to the opposites-attract formula that the story practically writes itself.

Review copies provided by VIZ Media, LLC. Volume two will be released on March 2, 2011.

KAMISAMA KISS, VOLS. 1-2 • BY JULIETTA SUZUKI • VIZ • RATING: TEEN (13+)

From the stack: A Single Match

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If I had to pick a favorite boutique comics publisher, it would probably be Drawn & Quarterly, simply for the volume of work they’ve released that I really, really enjoy. If I isolate the portion of their catalog devoted to Japanese comics, their success rate is somewhat lower. I appreciate their efforts to bring avant-garde manga to English-reading audiences, but I don’t always particularly enjoy the individual works.

I like the work of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, particularly his autobiography, A Drifting Life., and his early genre work, Black Blizzard. I found Seiichi Hayashi’s Red Colored Elegy more of its time than enduring. Susumu Katsumata’s Red Snow was pure pleasure, but Imiri Sakabashira’s The Box Man struck me as a fleeting, flashy fever dream. I’m happy to report that Oji Suzuki’s collection of short stories, A Single Match, wound up on the positive end of the spectrum, though that wasn’t an instantaneous verdict.

Suzuki has a very distinct rhythm and sensibility, and it isn’t immediately accessible. His stories have a quality that’s both dreamlike and naturalistic, and it took a few stories for me to yield to the style. In dreams, you find yourself recognizing people and places you’ve never been before, accepting circumstances that are totally alien to your experience and constructing memories that you claim as your own, even though you know that they aren’t. It’s a bit unsettling to see that illogically coherent frame of reference captured so precisely on paper, and since the experience of dreams isn’t an entirely comfortable one to begin with, the feeling of unease can be magnified.

“Tale of Remembrance” is an extraordinary example of this real-but-not approach. Narrative perspective seems to shift before you realize it. Inky blackness frames indelible images like a forlorn, faceless girl floating in the sky. Specific impressions that seem like memory are transformed into unsettling visual metaphors. Emotional undercurrents run from tender to suggestively menacing. It’s quite a reading experience, and it’s certainly not the only one of its kind in this collection.

Even the more ostensibly straightforward stories like “Mountain Town” keep you on uncertain footing. In this piece, a boy accompanies his father to return a scooter that he’d used for a part-time job. The journey is fraught with tension, unspoken and verbalized. The boy seesaws between uncomplicated comfort in his father’s company and painful awareness of the man’s shortcomings. Suzuki’s illustrations here are generally fairly concrete, though there are flashes of abstraction, like a memory is being filled in with a raw, emotional conceptualization.

As much as I ended up enjoying this collection, I have to admit to initial unease and impatience. It’s not a work that grabs you from the first page, and I’m not even sure the works are best appreciated as a single reading experience. They were published in Seirindo’s legendary alternative anthology, Garo, and I found myself wondering how they would have read in that context. The notion of getting a small dose of Suzuki’s work in the midst of a variety of other styles and subjects was appealing to me. When I read the stories again, I’ll sprinkle them in between other works to see if my theory is correct.

And I certainly will read them again. It’s nice to be challenged by a work, especially when the work rewards you for rising to that challenge. And I would happily read any of Suzuki’s work that Drawn & Quarterly chooses to publish, though maybe not all at once.

Black Jack, Vols. 12-13

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In the mold of Kate and David’s recent co-review of Salvatore, Kate takes the lead along with David and MJ, in a collaborative look at Tezuka’s Black Jack.

Black Jack, Vols. 12-13 | By Osamu Tezuka | Published by Vertical, Inc. | Buy at Amazon

KATE: One of the things that strikes me most about Black Jack is its consistency: every volume has one or two dud stories, but on the whole, the series is uniformly good, even when Tezuka is essentially repeating himself with a theme-and-variation on an earlier plot. If you were going to point to one story in volumes twelve or thirteen as an example of what Tezuka does best, what would it be and why?

DAVID: While I agree that it’s a consistently entertaining series, I do have a clear favorite from these two volumes. It’s “A Night in a Cottage” from the 13th volume. Black Jack is out driving on a lonesome road at night, and he meets a very pregnant woman who’s harboring a great deal of emotional pain. There are some great twists in this story, which I won’t spoil, but what I like best about it is how Tezuka constructs things so that Black Jack’s mythology is stripped away. The woman knows nothing about Black Jack’s notoriety, so he can abandon some of his public posture, and readers can see what parts of his personality endure when he isn’t playing for an audience. It’s really written well, and it’s kind of a gift for fans of the character.

MJ: I don’t know if I can say that this story is what Tezuka does best, because it feels a little atypical for the series, but I’d say my favorite here is “The Pirate’s Arm.” It’s the story of a student gymnast whose arm develops gangrene. Black Jack must amputate the arm, but he replaces it with a prosthetic that appears to have the ability to talk. Frequently, the series’ more heartwarming stories aren’t necessarily its best, but this one really works for me. It’s surprisingly subtle, with a real payoff in the end.

DAVID: I liked that one a lot, partly because I could imagine it providing inspiration to future mangaka.

KATE: Both of those stories were on my short list, too, though my favorite was “Wildcat Boy,” from volume 12. It’s no secret that Tezuka loved the movies, and “Wildcat” is a thoughtful tribute to two cinema legends: Francois Truffaut and Satyajit Ray. As one might guess from the title, the story features a patient who was raised by ocelots — at least, that’s what I think they are — and views human beings with suspicion. You don’t need to know anything about “The Wild Child” or “The World of Apu,” however, to appreciate the story, as it’s a compelling, if slightly ham-fisted, meditation on that age-old question: is civilization really man’s natural state? Like many “Black Jack” stories, the final twist reveals Jack to be wiser and more attuned to the natural world than his money-grubbing might suggest.

So far, we’ve focused on specific stories we liked. Were there any stories in volumes 12 or 13 that you felt didn’t work? If so, why?

MJ: I really liked that story too, Kate. And if it’s ham-fisted, I think it might be necessarily so. Though I think we three tend to appreciate subtlety a great deal, I suspect Tezuka knew his readers well.

As for stories that don’t work well here, the first that jumps to mind for me is “A Challenge of the Third Kind,” in which Black Jack is summoned to operate on an alien. While the concept is not so far out of line with the leaps of logic the series establishes as standard, there’s a line crossed here somewhere that strains that standard to the point of exasperation. Even as a gag manga, I had difficulty enjoying that story, and I’m a pretty generous reader when it comes to this kind of fantasy.

DAVID: As for low points in these two volumes, I’d pick “Looking Good” from volume 12. For me, a good Black Jack story must include one of these three things: sufficiently gruesome medical content; an emotionally compelling patient; or creepy Pinoko antics. “Looking Good” had none of these things, and, beyond that, it didn’t really have much in the way of internal logic.

It’s about a thug who’s running a protection racket on local school festivals, which is potentially hilarious, whether you like school festivals in manga or not. (I’m very much in the pro-festival camp, though that doesn’t mean I don’t relish them when they go very wrong.) It seems like the story never quite came together on basic terms, nor did it live up to its goofy potential.

KATE: I’m with MJ: I find Tezuka’s forays into science fiction and the supernatural kind of clumsy. I can believe that Black Jack would operate on himself in the Australian outback or perform a full-body skin graft because both acts are proof of his surgical mojo. But when it involves aliens or ghosts? Too gimmicky for me; those stories suggest a “very special Halloween edition of House, MD” or a Scooby Doo episode. (Just add meddling kids and stir!)

“The Cursed Operation,” which appears in volume 13, is a good example of what I mean. After a mummy arrives at a hospital for x-rays, strange things start to happen. Jack scoffs at the doctors and nurses who refuse to carry out their duties, declaring his intent to clear the hospital’s surgical backlog by operating on several patients at once. Strike one: the spooky happenings are neither scary nor funny. Strike two: Tezuka has already used the “operating on a bunch of people at once” plot in earlier volumes. Strike three: Tezuka tries to freshen up the “operating on a bunch of people at once” plot by including the ancient mummy as a patient. As a result, the story feels perfunctory; it’s the kind of story that Tezuka could produce on autopilot, and it shows; there’s nothing remotely surprising or interesting about the outcome.

Shifting gears a bit, I wanted to ask you about the art. Do you have a favorite scene or character from volumes 12 and 13? What makes it work for you?

DAVID: I was very taken with “Death of an Actress” in volume 13. The character design is delightful, and I always love Tezuka’s way of rendering a beautiful woman. I enjoy that because that beauty is very much in Tezuka’s unique style. If you held these beauties up against more conventional renderings of that kind of woman, they wouldn’t stand a chance, but within this context, it conveys. I also love the Hollywood glamor of the story, the fading glory, and the cruel, showbiz cynicism that comes across very efficiently. It’s not the flashiest piece in either volume, but I thought the drawings worked really well with the content.

MJ: David, I agree very much with what you say here about the way Tezuka draws a beautiful woman. I think I have a special fondness for his rendering, maybe because it’s unconventional.

That said, I do have a favorite scene of my own. It’s from the story you mention earlier, David, “Night Cottage.” There’s a wordless page near the end, when Black Jack is waking up in the cottage that is just so expressive. The morning sun pushing through the trees, Black Jack’s moment of panic when he realizes his companion is gone–I think it’s a beautifully crafted scene. Also, I especially enjoy the character of Black Jack when he’s *not* in control, so this brief, silent moment is one I like a great deal.

KATE: For me, it’s all about the character designs. Tezuka is often accused of being too “cartoony” (whatever that means), but in Black Jack, his flair for physical exaggeration works exceptionally well. Tezuka is able to pack a tremendous amount of information into his character designs, which allows him to jump into each story with a minimum of exposition. Going back to “Wildcat Boy,” for example, we almost don’t need to be told that Apu has been raised by wild animals; it’s evident in the way Tezuka draws Apu’s hands, which look more like claws than fingers, and Apu’s teeth, which are sharp and pointed. Even as Black Jack attempts to “civilize” Apu, the boy never loses his feral appearance; in a nice touch, he arches his back and hisses.

MJ: I think it’s true that Tezuka’s style is “cartoony,” but I also don’t think of that as a negative. The ability to evoke a fully-realized character using broad strokes is part of his genius, as far as I’m concerned. It’s depressing to me that this something people cite as a problem with his work.

DAVID: Speaking of character design, I’m compelled to mention something I always mention when I write about this series: Pinoko. I love her. She’s so creepy and sad, yet strangely cute. If I had to vote for my favorite kid sidekick of all time, she’d win by a mile, because she’s so very, very wrong on so many levels.

MJ: Oh, I so agree, David. I think we’re reminded of that especially here in “Teratoid Cystoma, Part 2,” in which Black Jack is asked to operate on a cystoma similar (but not quite similar enough) to Pinoko in her original form. I’m struck here by how much she’s treated like a child, and maybe even how much she acts like one, in a story that serves as such a clear reminder of her origins.

KATE: Even though I’m firmly in the anti-Pinoko camp, I also found “Teratoid Cystoma, Part 2” quite moving. Pinoko’s desire to have a friend (or “brother,” as she says) who shares the same history is surprisingly touching; it underscores just how unnatural and isolating her situation is, and how misunderstood she feels. Jack’s reaction, too, is oddly affecting; though he balks at playing Pinoko’s father, his desire to protect her from disappointment is evident in the delicate (and somewhat deceptive) way he tries to manage her expectations about the operation.

So what I guess I’m saying is that “Teratoid Cystoma, Part 2” might be on my short list of great Black Jack stories, even though I’m not a Pinoko fan.

And is it just me, or does Pinoko sound oddly like Sean Connery in the English translation?

DAVID: I can honestly say I’ve never made the Connery connection.

KATE: Itsssh those schlurry “ess” sounds that irresistibly reminds me of Connery.

MJ: I can definitely see the Connery connection, though I think in my head she’s a bit more… Cindy Brady. Probably Connery is preferable. :D

DAVID: I’m entirely behind the Cindy Brady comparison. They both seem to not be quite human and make me uneasy.

KATE: As our heated debate over Pinoko suggests, Black Jack really belongs to the world of pop culture more than many of Tezuka’s other mature works. There’s a pulpy, operatic quality to the stories in Black Jack that reminds me of my favorite television shows, and I get the feeling that’s exactly what Tezuka intended. I love his more self-consciously literary works, too, but Black Jack is probably his most entertaining series, and the easiest to recommend to civilians and continuity freaks, as anyone — and I mean anyone — could pick up either volume 12 or 13, read a story, and get the gist of the series.

Images Copyright © Tezuka Productions. Translation Coypright © Vertical Inc.

Two on friendship

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Weird as it may be to say for someone who reads a fair amount of shônen manga, I think friendship is an under-examined subject in comics. There are some great ones that offer insights into unromantic bonds among unrelated people, but new examples are always welcome. I’ve recently enjoyed two relative newcomers to this genre, both of which address the shifting fortunes of friendship. They’re very different, but each is well worth a read.

Sarah Oleksyk’s Ivy (Oni Press) is about as frank an examination of emotional growing pains as you’re likely to find. Its titular heroine is suffering through the restrictions of high-school life in a small town, trying to make decisions about her future that she knows her mother would oppose, and wondering why her closest friends seem to be distancing themselves from her. Readers won’t wonder, as Ivy doesn’t seem like an easy person to be around. To be perfectly honest, she’s kind of awful, but she’s awful in achingly specific, recognizable ways.

Oleksyk doesn’t seem to be doing that thing where a creator will trick you into loving her unsympathetic protagonist. She seems more hopeful that you won’t judge Ivy too harshly and that you’ll see the bits of her that track with the bits of you that you may not care to remember. That was my experience with the book. I could identify with both the friends who find Ivy increasingly hard to take (“She makes fun of everything I say!”) and the spikes of temper and feelings of ill use and jealousy that seem to bubble out of Ivy before she even realizes it. There are tons of moments that acutely express feelings I’ve had in the past, even if I haven’t shared the identical experience that triggered them.

That kind of pungent, “I’ve felt that before” specificity informs the entire book, even when “I’ve felt that before” is accompanied by the less flattering sensation that I’ve read some of this before. While Oleksyk’s characters never feel less than uniquely alive, some of their experiences cover very well-traveled ground. Oleksyk brings freshness to Ivy’s first serious romantic relationship (which you will probably watch through spread fingers with some bad ex’s face floating unbidden in your memory), but her conflict with her mother and troubles with a teacher felt very predictable. It’s not that these threads aren’t executed well or aren’t true to the character; it’s that these specific arcs have been portrayed so often and so well that it’s hard not to feel that you’ve been there and done that.

But, though it all, Oleksyk remains true to the fact that her heroine isn’t a particularly nice person. Ivy is worthy of interest and sympathy, but she has a lot of growing up to do. That clear-eyed understanding, combined with a note-perfect facility for teen turmoil (along with splendid, expressive art), make Ivy a standout.

(Comments based on a digital review copy provided by the publisher. I haven’t seen the physical book, so I can’t comment on its production values.)

In a much lighter vein is the first volume of Yuuki Fujimoto’s The Stellar Six of Gingacho (Tokyopop), which follows six friends who are all children of various vendors in a small market street. Mike, the green grocer’s daughter, has noticed that the group has been drifting apart as they’ve gotten older and split off into different classes at school. She’s made new friends and developed new interests herself, but she doesn’t want to lose the special bond that she’s formed with this neighborhood pack. So she comes up with things they can do as a group, particularly when they’re tied to their shared identity as vendors’ kids.

The best parts of this book are tied to Market Street. Perhaps it reveals too much in the way of postmodern hippie leanings on my part, but I love stories that feature small businesses and independent entrepreneurs. Fujimoto seems to share my admiration, and the bustle of Market Street, the interactions between various shop owners and their collective efforts, play an important role beyond just giving the ensemble cast a commonality. Market Street has a warm sense of place, and it’s easy to see why Mike wants to nourish the parts of her that are spring from it.

Not unexpectedly, things tend to sag when events move away from the neighborhood. The slow-building subplot of Mike’s dawning romantic feelings for longtime friend Kuro (the fishmonger’s son) is nice enough, but it feels generic compared to the ensemble elements. When the kids are at school, the book resembles any number of competent middle-school romances. If Fujimoto figures out how to ground Mike and Kuro’s developing relationship in the atmosphere and events of Market Street, my concerns will be nullified. (I’ll also be happy if she devotes more individual attention to the other members of the ensemble.)

Fujimoto does end the volume on a wonderful high note. Its final story introduces Market Street’s curmudgeonly granny of a candy shop owner. I’ve expressed my fondness for this type of character before, and I love this specimen’s playfully combative relationship with the kids and her abiding loyalty to her neighborhood, no matter how often she carps about details. Her loyalty is returned in just the right proportion in a lovely story about neighbors doing right by each other and generations finding unexpected ways to connect.

If I were to complain about anything about the book, it would be the positively miniscule type size of the many conversational asides Fujimoto gives her characters. It’s hard to see how they could be any larger, but they’re an absolute chore to decipher, and the affection the book earns overall makes me not want to miss a word.

(The Stellar Six of Gingacho originally ran in Hakusensha’s Hana to Yume and The Hana to Yume for a total of ten volumes.)

MMF: Barefoot Gen 1 and 2

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Before preparing for the current Manga Moveable Feast, I’d only read about a chapter of Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen (Last Gasp), the one reprinted in the back of Frederik Schodt’s Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics.

This wasn’t because I was unimpressed with that sample or thought it was in some way unworthy. I mean, you can’t spend any time talking with people who love manga and not have Barefoot Gen come up in the most enthusiastic, even reverent, terms.

No, the reason is that I tend to compartmentalize things. I generally read comics to be entertained on some level, to distract myself from reality. This doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy comics that address dark themes or tragedy. I just prefer a level of distance from the truly hurtful, tragic aspects of life. So an autobiographical comic about the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima… well, it’s a lot, you know?

In the first volume, we meet the Nakaokas, the close stand-ins for Nakazawa’s own family. Beyond the deprivations of being average citizens during wartime, the Nakaokas are enduring persecution from their neighbors. Daikichi, the father, is morally opposed to the war, and he’s becoming increasingly frank about it as the conflict drags on. But he’s got a pregnant wife, Kirie, and five children to support, in spite of efforts of their pro-war acquaintances to isolate them and make their lives difficult.

Second-youngest son Gen doesn’t fully understand the source of his family’s woes, though he tries to ameliorate them in kid-like ways. He schemes to find them food and other comforts, and he resorts to violence when the insults against his father and the persecution of his parents and siblings become too much to stand. In the space of a volume, he does gain a better understanding of his parents’ principles and their cost, and he learns to sacrifice for others. That last skill will be essential, as the atomic bomb is dropped on his home town at the end of the first volume.

His town is destroyed, countless lives are lost, and his family is decimated before his eyes. The trauma triggers Kirie’s labor, so Gen is left with terrible grief, horror everywhere, and a mother and infant sister to support and protect. And he’s just a kid. And he’s a kid wading through a sea of horror and death the likes of which no one on Earth had ever experienced before it happened to these people. The struggle to survive goes from difficult to seemingly impossible, and maybe it’s only Gen’s youth and relative innocence that help him through it. He’s not immune to horror and despair, but his father so forcefully conveyed the importance of survival to Gen that he has at least some functional armor, something to keep him plodding along through the sea of bodies, the stench, and the deprivation.

I thought I had grown accustomed to the juxtaposition of cartoon stylization with serious subject matter during my exposure to the work of Osamu Tezuka. Nakazawa was a great admirer of Tezuka’s work, and you can see the influence. That said, I sometimes found the relationship between content and style uncomfortable. Early chapters are sprinkled with Gen’s more innocent antics, juxtaposed with their father’s simmering rage, his bruised and battered face. That rage infects Gen from time to time, and his physical response to injustices is shocking, even grotesque. There’s casual cartoon violence that escalates into sincere, unsettling violence, and I found it challenging to adjust to the shifts.

Either Nakazawa found surer footing in the second volume (or I did) after relative trivialities are literally blown away. Gen still behaves like a child sometimes, but he is a child, and it’s a relief that those responses still live in him somewhere. Even in the midst of all this horror  and with all of these terrible responsibilities, Gen can still be distracted and follow a generous or curious impulse. The weight of circumstances always reasserts itself, but an innocent part of his nature has survived along with his body.

And he’s not a conventional shônen boy hero: friendship and victory aren’t options; the hard work of living a bit longer and making sure the people he loves and still has do as well is the only thing he has left. Beyond the mechanics of moment-to-moment life, like food and water, there’s still injustice aplenty, and there’s the despair of strangers on all sides.

It’s bleak, and at times it’s exhausting to read, though I don’t mean either of those as a criticism. Much as I hate catchphrases like “sharing his truth,” that’s what Nakazawa is doing here, and the force and specificity of it is overwhelming.

I wish I could claim that these volumes have changed my view on comics that speak these kinds of harsh truths, but I can’t. My interest in them is still the exception rather than the rule and probably always will be. But I will finish Barefoot Gen, if only because I feel like I should for reasons that go beyond merely wanting to because it’s a comic I admire. As I said, it’s a lot.

Amnesia Labyrinth, Vol. 1

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In public, Souji Kushiki leads a charmed life: he’s wealthy and handsome, popular with girls, smarter than his classmates, and faster than anyone on the track team. In private, Souji lives under a dark cloud: his older brother disappeared, a possible victim of foul play, while his sisters paw and flirt with him like Aphrodite and Hera competing for Paris’ affections. Souji’s private and public lives collide when a family emergency requires him to return home from boarding school. Souji’s new school turns out to be Murder High: the school’s top student, best athlete, and council president have all been brutally killed, and the evidence suggests that someone in the Kushiki household is responsible.

For a manga that features incest, murder, and at least one character with a split personality, Amnesia Labyrinth is awfully dull, plodding from scene to scene with little sense of urgency. Part of the problem lies with the source material; as writer Nagaru Tanigawa explains in the afterword to volume one, Amnesia Labyrinth was “based on a story that, while it didn’t have enough to become a full-fledged novel, had been kicking around in my head for years.” He admitted that he had to “dismantle” his original idea and “reinvent the characters”; small wonder that the published version was, by his own admission, filled with “lazy, phantom passages,” vestiges of an earlier story idea.

Those “phantom passages” crop up repeatedly throughout the manga, especially when Souji interacts with his sisters. In one excruciatingly pointless scene, Souji watches younger sis Harumi eat a popsicle, a wordless moment that serves no dramatic purpose other than to reinforce the idea that Harumi is more demure than sibling rivals Youko and Saki. Other scenes go on too long; in chapter one, for example, Tanigawa makes one of his female characters recite Souji’s entire CV in comic detail. (“Your grades… they’re among the top in the nation,” Sasai declares. “You put everyone to shame on Sports Day. You weren’t even on the track team, but you still cleaned up in the races.”)

That expository soliloquy points to one of Amnesia Labyrinth‘s other problems: Souji. Though we learn a lot about him from other characters, we never see Souji do anything that warrants their high esteem; it’s hard to imagine why his three sisters are so keen to bed him, as he seems like a rather ordinary teen, passive in attitude and behavior. The only moments in which we get a glimpse of his true personality are when he interacts with Sasai, a pushy classmate from his new school. She teases and flatters Souji, trying to provoke a response, and when that strategy fails, engages him in a semi-philosophical conversation about death. Their conversation might be trivial from an adult point of view, but from a teenage perspective, it feels right, two young people trying to make a terrible abstraction seem less scary.

Souji’s sisters are equally problematic. They’re a harem of types, rather than three distinctive characters: Youko, Souji’s full sister, is crazy and wears a kimono; Harumi, Souji’s stepsister, is the embodiment of moe, blushing and stammering around Souji; and Saki, Souji’s half sister, is a fetish object, cheerfully trading a maid’s outfit for a school uniform. The girls’ sexual aggression isn’t beyond the realm of possibility; one might plausibly infer that their gamesmanship and flirtation are an attempt to establish a pecking order. But the scenes lack emotion or context, registering more as cheap titillation — hey, Souji’s such a stud that even his sisters want him! — than an essential element of the plot.

The one bright spot in this otherwise lackluster affair is the art. Using clean, precise linework, Natsumi Kohane renders each setting in careful detail, drawing a sharp distinction between the Kushiki’s isolated rural home and the school’s bustling urban neighborhood. There’s a lovely — if unnecessary — sequence of panels showing us what kind of flowers grow in the Kushiki’s garden, thus establishing the time of year and suggesting the home’s claustrophobic, hothouse atmosphere. (It’s a bit like finding a tribute to Kazuo Miyagawa’s cinematography embedded in a Vin Diesel flick.) Even the fanservice is handled tastefully; the female characters have plausible, pleasing body shapes that demonstrate a firm grasp of basic anatomy. There’s some brief nudity, but we’re spared the panty shots and boob collisions typical of harem manga.

I’m hesitant to pan Amnesia Labyrinth, as I know I’m not its target audience. Souji is clearly intended to be a surrogate for teenage boys who fantasize about being brilliant, athletic, and irresistible to girls without the slightest effort. For readers outside this demographic, however, the series’ main draw — the mystery — is too underdeveloped to be interesting, and the characterizations too thin to inspire sympathy for or identification with any of the cast.

Review copy provided by Seven Seas. Volume one will be released on February 28, 2011.

AMNESIA LABYRINTH, VOL. 1 • STORY BY NAGARU TANIGAWA, ART BY NATSUMI KOHANE, CHARACTER DESIGNS BY HINATA TAKEDA • SEVEN SEAS • 194 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

From the stack: The Summit of the Gods vol. 2

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The second volume of The Summit of the Gods (Fanfare/Ponent Mon), written by Yumemakura Baku and illustrated by Jiro Taniguchi, delves deeply into both the psychology and behavior of its characters, though one particular aspect of their psychology and the behavior it inspires remains utterly baffling to me. I can think of few things I’d rather do less than dangle from an icy mountain by a rope. Since that’s almost all these characters think about, one might anticipate some remoteness on my part as a reader.

This reaction is averted by the sheer density of the work – the madly detailed illustrations, the tense technicalities of climbing, and the oblique revelation of small aspects of the characters. I say small aspects because Baku and Taniguchi make virtually no attempt to answer the big question of how people can dedicate their lives to an activity that’s almost entirely perilous, no matter how prepared you may be.

There’s a lot of dialogue, but there’s very little in the way of speech-making. Nobody really gazes off into the middle distance and talks about the nobility of the climb or anything of that sort. That, to my way of thinking, would have been insufferable, not to mention unpersuasive. The point-of-view character, Fukamachi, has specific interests instead of theses to prove. His attempts to understand things that have happened are different than grasping at reasons or creating context.

Most of the time in this volume is spent with Fukamachi talking to people who know legendary, troubled climber Habu. He learns of an ill-fated climb in Europe and another in Tibet. He digs into the life story of one of Habu’s rivals, finding new ways that their respective careers intersected and ran parallel. Fukamachi has an ultimate goal and mysteries to solve, but he has no specific urgency in his efforts. He’s hearing too many interesting stories to want to bring the process to a speedy conclusion.

The same can be said of the book itself. It doesn’t really have an overwhelming momentum to it, though individual sequences are often very exciting. There’s a level of remove, an analytical quality even to the nail-biting moments that suggests the perspective of a detached (but not entirely unmoved) observer. It’s a very intellectual, meticulous approach to very visceral material, and a big part of the appeal of the series is that counterpoint.

Another part is Taniguchi’s undeniably beautiful illustrations. He exhibits great restraint and fidelity in the way he renders people, keeping them on the unglamorous side. They look average, if robust, instead of heroic, which raises the stakes when they risk their lives. And his breathtaking vistas are a marvelous substitute for seeing these peaks in person.

I’m not really sure where The Summit of the Gods fits in the seinen universe, with its cerebral muscularity. With the possible exception of Hiroshi Hirata’s Satsuma Gishiden (Dark Horse), it’s unlike just about anything else I’ve read, even from Taniguchi. It’s just a tremendously confident work, and it’s rare to feel that quality come through so clearly, yet so modestly at the same time.

Here’s my review of the first volume.